Jeff Buckley isn’t just any pop icon. On a music landscape littered with tragic and pointless early departures, the singer’s 1997 drowning at the age of 30 surely ranks among the most senseless. While numerous albums featuring Buckley’s studio tracks and concert recordings emerged after his death, the only album he released, 1994’s “Grace,” proved potent enough to enshrine him in the pop music pantheon.

Bassist Andrew Lion and pianist Ruthie Dineen knew they were walking on sacred ground when they started arranging songs from “Grace” for the Oakland instrumental ensemble they co-lead, Negative Press Project.

“He’s almost a deity to some folks,” Lion said during a recent interview with Dineen at a Berkeley cafe. “We knew this could go either way, pissing people off or really turning people on.”

The band celebrates the release of its second album, “Eternal Life: Jeff Buckley Songs and Sounds,” Friday, Nov. 17, at Doc’s Lab. It also plays Oakland’s Avonova on Sunday, Nov. 19, and San Francisco’s Jazz Chez Hanny on Dec. 3.

The double album includes a disc with eight pieces based on songs from “Grace,” instrumental arrangements that evoke the spirit and vibe of the source material rather than turning the tunes into platforms for extended improvisation. The second disc is an EP featuring the band with vocals by Jeff Campbell (“Lover, You Should Have Come Over”), Jeff Denson (“So Real”) and Mia Pixley (“Eternal Life”), who will join Negative Press Project at Doc’s Lab.

One person who picked up on the concept right away was Denson, an internationally esteemed bassist and professor at California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley, who mentored Lion while he was earning a jazz studies degree. He caught the performance where Lion and Dineen introduced their first Buckley arrangements and encouraged them to pursue the project.

Denson ended up co-producing the album and releasing it on his label, Ridgeway Records, a process that immersed him in the music of an artist he had overlooked while focusing on jazz and European classical music as a student in the ’90s.

“I was blown away by his music, and had I heard it as a teenager I would have flipped,” Denson said. “It likely would have changed my entire trajectory in music. It had this allure to it. When I asked Andrew and Ruthie about recording the project, I didn’t know I was going to jump down the rabbit hole.”

While Negative Press Project usually performs as an electroacoustic septet, Lion and Dineen draw on a pool of more than a dozen players for any given gig. At Doc’s Lab, the band will include alto saxophonist Chris Sullivan, tenor saxophonist Lyle Link, trumpeter Max Miller-Loran, drummer Isaac Schwartz and guitarist Luis Salcedo.

An older brother turned Dineen on to Buckley’s music years ago, and she absorbed it as part of her musical DNA. But in the course of the project she realized that, like Denson, most of the jazz cats in the band “had no experience with Buckley’s music or who he was,” she said.

“But they brought in their own voices and personalities,” Dineen said. “You could pick up Coltrane’s influence on Lyle Link. I can hear Ella in Mia’s vocal take. One of the coolest things is that Buckley does some arrangements too, like his amazing version of ‘Hallelujah.’”

Dineen, who grew up in Fairfield and hails from a Salvadoran American family, also graduated with a jazz performance degree from California Jazz Conservatory. The deputy director of programs at Richmond’s East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, she brings an expansive palette of influences into the ensemble, from Latin jazz and indie rock to classical music and the Pat Metheny Group.

An Oakland native, Lion came to jazz relatively late. A founding member of the rock band Spoke, he also tours with singer-songwriter Jeff Campbell (including a performance last year on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”). All of his and Dineen’s disparate experiences find their way into Negative Press Project’s Buckley material, which has continued to evolve since the recording.

“I realized we don’t have to use every voice all the time,” Lion said. “If we’re all a set of colors, you don’t want to squeeze all the oil out of all the tubes at once.”